SEO Title Characters & Meta Description

Page Titles and Descriptions

Page Titles are very important for Search engines. The titles in the browser are displayed in the title bar. The search engines would look at the this title bar to determine what the page is all about.

Description tags are called meta tags as they are not displayed by the browsers as that of titles. But these descriptions may be displayed by some search engines. They are used to describe the contents of a page in 2 or 3 sentences.

The Meta title tag is far more important than your meta tags. The Meta title characters are best when its about 65 characters (meta title tag recommended characters length) including white spaces and are keyword rich. More weight-age is usually given to keywords in title tags. Use a unique title on each page of your website and make it describe what will be found on that page. Make sure the title and description tag matches the pages content. Also make sure that the main keywords for each page are in the title tag. Meta title characters with spaces should be minimal i.e. it should not start or and with a space.

Meta description tag is usually the text displayed under your page title in the SERPs. The Meta description characters are best when its about 65 characters. This helps the user decide which of the 10 results to click on, or to move to the next page or a different phrase. Make the meta description tag human readable and enticing.

Meta Keywords tag are used to place your keywords that you think a surfer would search in Search engines. Repeating keywords unnecessarily would be considered spam and you may get permanently banned from SERP’s

Most of the webmasters (including me) believe the following are good quantitatively

Meta Title Length = 63 characters
Meta Keyword tag = 256 characters
Meta Description tag = 156 characters

All values are including spaces, and make sure beyond this limit the stuff will get cropped automatically.

Warning: DO NOT stuff your title with just keywords.

Title are important even in your everyday life

Let’s say you are in a music store looking for cd’s of Rock Music. As a browser, your eyes review the titles of each cd case looking for something that is relevant to what you are searching for. Title is so important even here.

Most Common Title Errors

* The title tag should be a description of the page and not a long list of keywords.

Example of a Bad Title

seo freelancer, seo freelancing, freelancer seo, freelance seo, search engine optimization, seo consultant, google, yahoo, msn
* Missing titles in your pages. Some webmasters forget to include Title tags and hence it would be shown as “Untitled Document” by default.
* Most common title’s seen in user web pages is “Welcome to my Page”. Its useless as it tells nothing about the Page Content.
* Some webmasters also include their domain name in the title. Something like “SEOFreelancing.com” as a title is bad.
* Your Titles in the wrong position.
* Confusing and inaccurate titles.
* Too many Spaces in Meta Title

SEO Keyword Research

Steps for Keyword Research

1. Make a initial list of every possible search word/phrase referred to as keywords that a potential customer may use to look
for your product, information or services that you have on your website. Use more phrases rather then individual words.

2. Don’t use highly competitive keywords initially in the first phase of your seo as your seo handwork would get wasted. Try getting your pages ranked for less competitive keywords (but relevant) initially .

3. The more information you can include in your keywords , the better. What I mean by information is be specific about the
location or services you provide. Add your location to your keyword if your content is geographically sensitive.

For example: A person may use “search engine optimization India” is you are looking for an SEO from India.

4. Add and refine the keywords you listed above by analyzing your competitors keywords. For each of the top 3 pages you find in Google, yahoo and msn make a list of the title and keyword tags. See if you can find patterns of why these 3 pages are ranked for the keywords you wanted to be ranked for.

My approach to remove and prune the above keyword list is to

* Remove difficult terms
* Remove Over-Competitive terms
* Use questions for which your website would provide answers or solutions
* Remove Ambiguous and broad terms (try to be as specific as possible)

5. Try to append the following most common action words to your keywords wherever relevant and make sure your website caters to them.

Some of the action words are:

Free
Buy
Find
Purchase
Discounted
Lowest Price
Luxury
Cheap

and so on.

6. Avoid keywords that do not ad any value or weight to your keyword list such as

The
Of
For
Or
This
And
That
To
www
web

and so on.

7. Keep track of your server logs or stats to check what people have searched for (keyword) to reach your site. keep track of those main top keywords that people have used to reach your site and hence make them your primary keywords over a long span of time to capture the market for those keywords in Google, Yahoo and MSN.

8. Ask your customers and potential customers what all keywords they had used in order to get to your site. Try to pick out the most relevant keywords from the list and use them on your website.

9. Try getting a ranking by using the most common misspelled keywords.

For example: A person may use “search engine optimization” or “search engine optimization” to search for an SEO website.

10. Use both singular and plural versions of your top keywords.

For example: A person may use “seo freelancer” or “seo freelancers” to search for an SEO website.

11. Use Specialized Keyword Tools to measure the actual statistics or popularity that your keywords give eliminate the few
that are not getting traffic.